Classic Army Bulls***

This comes from a friend who is actually enlisted USAF, but you know how this stuff works.

I'm not sure if my favorite part is the bad punctuation, the GIANT FONT that presents the independent clause as if it were a clearly ridiculous statement of fact, the tiny font trying to hide the subordinate clause, or the fact that even with the subordinate clause this statement is obviously false. Nobody follows "the low risk guidelines" set forth in doctrine. They just handle their business so it doesn't end up on somebody else's desk. Everyone knows this, because everyone is a member of the community you're describing. You're not fooling anybody with this nonsense, but that doesn't stop the bureaucracy from saying it anyway.

Follow these links for more accurate pictures of drinking in the Army and Marine Corps. It's not that there isn't sometimes a problem. It's that you can't solve a problem like this with bulls***.

7 comments:

Eric Blair
said...

I heard a conversation between my BN CDR and the BDE CDR where the BDE CDR was basically teasing the BN CDR about how many men from the battalion were in detox. the BN CDR was like "Hey, I'm getting my men some help."

Eh... "battle buddy" is just a term soldiers use. And has been since at least the 90's. It was the Army's version of "comrade" or "dude in the next foxhole". You may not always like your battle buddy, and he might not be your friend, but you took care of him and he took care of you because in a firefight, you'll both be fighting to save each other.

It's of a piece with the Army's weird approach to language in general. You're not an engineer, you're a combat engineer. We don't have a morning meeting with the boss, we have a battle update briefing. "Battle buddy" is just the strangest version of that general idiom.

Yeah, I didn't mean soldiers using it themselves was strange... I found it jarring to see such a phrase inserted the middle of bureaucratic phrases like "high-risk drinking" and "puts you at risk" and "unhealthy decisions".

No, it is strange -- it's just a kind of strangeness that's utterly commonplace in the Army. Somebody wanted to institute the idea of the buddy system, but that didn't sound tough enough for soldiers. So they came up with the idea of telling them to call each other "battle buddy." And that is, of course, ridiculous -- but it is itself a decision created by a bureaucracy about how to talk to soldiers.

I only know one actual soldier who uses the phrase, and she shortens it to "Battle," as in, "How are you doing, Battle?"

In my experience, it was something cadre would use (i.e. "don't let me catch you out of arms reach of your battle buddy") or if you were telling a story but no other handy adjective to describe the guy in question ("so I was in the mess hall when my battle buddy dropped his tray on the floor"). And pretty much in every case, if you had a more apt adjective or the listener would recognize the name, you'd use that instead. So basically it was a step up from "this guy in my unit".